Fascism Watch for 2023-11-15: Let’s Talk Again About Mike Johnson

[solarbird]

Let’s get a little caught up on Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

He’s already in trouble for getting that clean extension of the funding bill through the House. Normally, I’d say he’ll survive it, because there’s no better option available to the MAGAts, but given that they want to close the government and crash the economy, I’m not so sure. They might use this as their pretext, because they know that traditionally, the American public makes its decisions about whether to re-elect a president based on how they feel six months before the election, which is to say May.

I don’t know whether that’s as important a timeframe as it used to be, given the current environment. But I still keep it in mind.

He’s also been back on his election denial shtick. He’s been into that the whole time, of course, but he was coy about it for a while. Not so much anymore.

I mean, it only makes sense, right? He was one of the Big Lie organisers, one of the people making up legal bullshit and calling it “theory,” and general – he was absolutely up to his eyebrows in it. So of course he’s still working that angle.

Those are the high points. And now that the House is in recess – thanks to his already being in trouble – let’s take a moment to get caught up on his background, shall we?

The Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly the Alliance Defence Fund, has been a christofascist organisation for decades. More relevantly, that includes the ten years he spent there on staff. They use the legal system to enforce their religious beliefs onto others, while calling this “defending the rights of Christians,” which ties in very well with Dominionist ideas that their version of Christianity trumps literally everything else, most specifically including everyone else’s rights. Rolling Stone gets into some interesting specifics about how this plays out in politics, but underlying all of that is that they see “human rights” as a zero-sum game, so every “right” you have is a removal of their right to control you if it’s a “right” they don’t want you to have.

That’s how they can say that their “rights” are under attack; that’s literally what they mean. If you do something they don’t like, they really do fundamentally believe that it’s their right to stop you, and they think that because “God’s law.” Until you understand that, you understand nothing about them.

And that’s also what you need to know about him. You don’t work for the ADF, arguing against the rights of LGBT people to exist legally and all of that, without being one of them, no matter what smoothing he may be applying to that now. You don’t get into weird shit like family plans to monitor what you read and watch, you don’t talk about a trip to Israel being “fulfilment of Biblical prophecy,” you don’t get this kind of ecstatic praise from Dutch Sheets if you’re not one of them.

That’s who he was; that’s who he still is.

Law Dork has a good writeup of his long, long history of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, travel-restricting, election-overturning bills. The Hill writes about his long history of climate-change denialism. And The Daily Beast has a good introductory roundup on all this too. And oh yeah, he’s on the board of a Christian fundamentalist publishing house that’s into the whole “monkeypox is punishment by god against gays” thing. You know, like AIDS and hurricanes that hit Florida.

That’s who he is. That’s who he always has been. That’s who he remains.

And it tells you everything you need to know about how he will act.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.